Gillian Tindall Book order

As read on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week 'A genius for a certain kind of social history that, in shining a light on one small place, illuminates a huge amount' Sunday TelegraphA toy train.

Crossrail, the `Elizabeth' line, is simply the latest way of traversing a very old east-west route through what was once countryside to the city and out again. Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, Gillian Tindall traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space.

From Eugenia Stanhope who sold Lord Chesterfield's scandalous letters, to the autocratic vicar who held the same parish from age 28 to 82, from the just- literate wife of a parish clerk who wrote riddles in his registers, to the cow-keeper who farmed 226 acres in Hornsey till he sold them profitably when the railways came through.

Haunted by an underlying sense of pain and foreboding, Joe Beech, a successful London publisher in his fifties, appears to have a fulfilling life with a long marriage, two grown children, and a vibrant social circle. Despite his strong health and charm, he grapples with inner turmoil that casts a shadow over his seemingly perfect existence.

A journey through time: from a scattering of cottages along a pre-roman horse track, to a medieval parish and staging post for travellers, onwards into a prosperous Tudor village favoured by gentlemen for their country seats and an 18th century resort of pleasure gardens eventually transformed by a warren of railway lines.

Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its magnetic field people who have variously found there education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret garden, even a different identity.

Just across the River Thames from St Paul's Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. they have seen the countrified lanes of London's marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements - and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air.

The seventeenth-century London Wenceslaus Hollar knew is now largely destroyed or buried. It is a carefully researched factual account, but she has also employed her novelist's skill to form an intricate whole - a life's texture which is also an absorbing and occasionally tragic story. schovat popis

Born into a poor family in the rocky heart of France in the year of Waterloo, tramping hundreds of miles to Paris to find work at the age of fourteen, Martin Nadaud grew up to become a stone mason, a revolutionary and a Member of Parliament. After the failure of the 1848 revolution, he was forced to flee to a long and lonely exile in England, seeking work on the building sites of Victorian London before becoming a schoolmaster in Wimbledon under an assumed name. He made his final triumphant return to his homeland in 1870, as modern France was created in turmoil. Publicly, it was a life finally crowned with success. But on a private level Nadaud suffered griefs and losses that left their mark. With access to family letters and personal papers that have lain unrevealed in France for the last hundred years, Gillian Tindall has constructed a moving and compelling picture of a working man against his colourful times.

Seven marriage proposals written to Celestine in the early 1860s, and carefully preserved by her, offer a glimpse of rural nineteenth century French life